Can economics rank slavery against free labor in terms of efficiency?

Politics, Philosophy and Economics 7 (3):327-340 (2008)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

The standard allocative efficiency criteria used by economists (Pareto efficiency and Kaldor-Hicks efficiency) are fundamentally unable to rank a slave-labor system against a free-labor system. Given either set of initial property rights assignments the market can reach (or fail to reach) allocative efficiency (that is, allocate resources to their highest-valued uses), but welfare economics provides no meta-framework for ranking initial assignments. This finding underscores the limits to the usefulness of efficiency criteria: they cannot settle all questions, and unfortunately are least decisive just where the stakes are greatest (namely, where wealth effects of alternative assignments are greatest). Explicitly ethical criteria are needed to make the ranking. Key Words: Pareto efficiency • Kaldor-Hicks efficiency • property rights • welfare economics.

Categories

Keywords

Reprint years

DOI

10.1177/1470594x08092106

Other Versions

No versions found

Links

PhilArchive

    This entry is not archived by us. If you are the author and have permission from the publisher, we recommend that you archive it. Many publishers automatically grant permission to authors to archive pre-prints. By uploading a copy of your work, you will enable us to better index it, making it easier to find.

    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 103,090

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

My notes

Similar books and articles

On a Fallacy in the Kaldor-Hicks Efficiency-Equity Analysis.David Ellerman - 2014 - Constitutional Political Economy 25 (2):125-136.
Any normative policy analysis not based on Kaldor-Hicks efficiency violates scholarly transparency norms.Gerrit De Geest - 2015 - In Aristides N. Hatzis & Nicholas Mercuro, Law and economics: philosophical issues and fundamental questions. New York, NY: Routledge.
Against Paretianism: A Wealth Creation Approach to Business Ethics.Carson Young - 2022 - Business Ethics Quarterly 32 (3):475-501.
A Limited Defense of Efficiency Against Charges of Incoherency and Bias.Jonathan H. Choi - 2022 - Social Philosophy and Policy 39 (1):252-267.
Is the “Point” of the Market Pareto or Kaldor-Hicks Efficiency?Heath Joseph - 2019 - Business Ethics Journal Review 7 (4):21-26.
Order Ethics, Economics, and Game Theory.Nikil Mukerji & Christoph Schumacher - 2016 - In Christoph Luetge & Nikil Mukerji, Order Ethics: An Ethical Framework for the Social Market Economy. Cham: Springer. pp. 93-108.
Ethics in economics: an introduction to moral frameworks.Jonathan Wight - 2015 - Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
Stability and Efficiency of Partitions in Matching Problems.İpek Özkal-Sanver - 2005 - Theory and Decision 59 (3):193-205.
An Evolutionary Efficiency Alternative to the Notion of Pareto Efficiency.Irene van Staveren - 2012 - Economic Thought 1 (1).
Welfare, Justice, and Pareto Efficiency.Sven Ove Hansson - 2004 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 7 (4):361-380.

Analytics

Added to PP
2009-01-28

Downloads
74 (#292,938)

6 months
11 (#244,814)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references